Taverna 2.3 and later has support for exporting the provenance of a workflow run in two different formats. The provenance contains details about the execution of the workflow, in particular it can show the origin of each piece of output data through the intermediate values and service executions.

This page describes the deprecated provenance export that is built-in to Taverna 2.3 and 2.4, generating traces in the OPM and Janus formats.

Rather than using this mechanism, users are recommended to install and use the updated Taverna-PROV plugin which produces PROV-O traces and includes the data values. The Taverna-PROV traces are more complete, more are "correct" and addresses many of the known issues in OPM/Janus.

Exporting provenance from the workbench

From the Taverna workbench, go to the Result perspective, select a finished workflow run (which has been run with provenance enabled), make sure the workflow output ports are selected (not a particular service) and click the Save All button.

This brings up the Workflow run data saver dialogue:

Click Save as OPM (experimental) or Save as Janus (experimental) depending on your preferred format. For OPM and Janus the tickboxes of input/output ports are ignored (all ports and services are included).

Select a folder and filename - the extension is .rdf for both formats.

Exporting provenance from the command line

Using the executeworkflowcommand line tool, use the option -opm FILE and/or -janus together with the database option-embedded or -clientserver to save the provenance traces. The -provenance option is implied by either -opm or -janus.

You can customize the provenance filenames:

Open Provenance Model - OPM

The Open Provenance Model is a standard specification and format for sharing provenance information across multiple tool. Taverna supports exporting provenance in a subset of OPM to a RDF/XML format according to the OPM OWL ontology.

These URIs, in particular under the http://ns.taverna.org.uk/ domain, are only used as unique identifiers, the actual data and workflow definitions are not available by following those links. The links are created to be compatible with the SCUFL2 identifiers.